Alexa Skills Kit

Give Your Vision a Voice and Reach More Customers

Why Build Alexa Skills?

Alexa is Amazon’s cloud-based voice service and the brain behind tens of millions of devices including the Echo family of devices, FireTV, Fire Tablet, and third-party devices with Alexa built-in. You can build capabilities, or skills, that make Alexa smarter and make everyday tasks faster, easier, and more delightful for customers. Tens of thousands of developers have built skills using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples. With ASK, anyone can leverage Amazon’s knowledge in voice design to build quickly and easily. Start building today to reimagine your customer experience for voice and reach customers where they are.

What You Can Do

Build Engaging Voice Experiences

Create natural, engaging voice experiences and reach and delight customers through Alexa-enabled devices. Use our SDKs, APIs, and code samples to build games, kid-friendly skills, content skills, music skills, and more. Deliver habit-forming skills that entertain, inform, and deliver value to the whole family and keep them coming back.

Add Visual and Touch Elements

Design, build, and deploy visually rich experiences to tens of millions of Alexa devices with screens. Use the Alexa Presentation Language to create voice-first, visual Alexa skills that adapt to different device types, including Echo Show, Echo Spot, Fire TV, Fire Tablet, and more. Build games that connect to Echo Buttons and turn an Echo device into a hub of interactive play.

Make Money with Alexa

When you build delightful skills with compelling content, customers win. Now you can make money with your Alexa skill. Sell premium content to enrich your Alexa skill experience with in-skill purchasing, or offer a new sales channel by selling physical goods and services with Amazon Pay for Alexa skills. You can also get paid for engaging skills that customers love most via Alexa Developer Rewards.

Example Skill Types

Explore common skill types by choosing one of the examples below.

Game Skills

Kid Skills

Content Skills

Music Skills

Alexa Skills Kit Capabilities

An Alexa skill includes a voice user interface, or VUI, to understand customer intents, and a back-end cloud service to process intents and tell Alexa how to respond. You can use capabilities in the Alexa Skills Kit to deliver both.

You can use text-to-speech (TTS) and audio streams to respond to customer queries. You can add visual elements and touch inputs on Alexa-compatible devices with displays, and can add support for Echo Buttons.

You can write your back-end web service using any programming language and host it in either AWS Lambda or the HTTPS server of your choice. You can use ASK SDKs to get started quickly and take advantage of AWS promotional credits for Alexa.